It’s been nine months since Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was sworn in as the secretary of Health and Human Services after a contentious Senate confirmation process. His mission was clear: Restore faith in the nation’s public health institutions, while also following through on the promises of his Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) agenda.
The department has already seen massive staff shakeups, the removal of petroleum-based food dyes from the market, the approval of new treatments for autism, changes to COVID vaccine mandates, updates to the dietary guidelines, reforms to the SNAP program to encourage healthier eating, initiatives to reverse the childhood chronic disease crisis in the United States, and more. But much like many of President Donald Trump’s top Cabinet members, Kennedy has faced criticism and pushback at every turn.
Last Friday, Megyn took her ‘Megyn Kelly Live’ tour to Miami, Florida, where she was joined by Calley Means to talk about what’s going on at HHS and the resistance Kennedy and the MAHA agenda has faced from inside the agency.
Where MAHA Stands
Means has been a formal and informal advisor to Kennedy for some time now and, until recently, served as a special government employee at HHS, which has given him a lot of insight into what is happening at the department.
As he described it, “special interests have rigged our health care system, rigged our food system for decades,” and he said President Trump gave Kennedy the go ahead to “be fearless” and “completely ignore special interests” to get to the bottom of the chronic disease epidemic and public health crises in America.
“What’s happening in America – and it’s very unique and pronounced in America – [is] when a child is born we actually recommend two times more vaccines than they do in Norway. In America, a child’s diet is 70 percent ultra-processed food; it’s 10 percent in other countries. In America, the American Medical Association, which really controls the standard of care for everyone in this room, still recommends gender affirming care for two year olds,” Means explained. “Getting older, a teen is eight hours on their phone. We have the highest cancer rates for kids of any society in human history this year in America… Childhood obesity rates, diabetes rates, are six-times more than any other developed country in the world.”
Means said President Trump asked Kennedy to convene with officials at the U.S. Department of Agriculture and other agencies to start talking about “the real root cause” of these issues, and that is exactly what they’ve done. “We started talking about our food system. We started talking about environmental toxins and chemicals,” he shared. “Things that the Democrats, Republicans in the past would never talk about.”
Part of the reason for that is the powerful grip lobbyists from those industries have on Washington, D.C. A former consultant to food and drug interests himself, Means referenced a recent dustup the White House had with the beverage industry because, as he described it, the “Trump administration is taking a sledgehammer to crappy food in school lunches and getting fresh food in schools.”
“They said that it is completely inappropriate that the FDA is finally studying the chemicals in our food. We have 10,000 more chemicals in our food today than Europe and the FDA actually has a gall, with the NIH, to study them. They said that hurt our business,” he recalled. “And the administration said, ‘No thanks. You can get out of this office.’ And that has never happened before.”
Inside Job
But it is not just outside interests that are taking issue with the direction of HHS. Means said the department, which includes the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) overseen by Marty Makary and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) headed up by Jay Bhattacharya, is filled with “deep staters” who have worked in the government “for a long time.”
There are, however, some well-intentioned people, and one of them forwarded him an email about the materials being passed around by staffers. “They’re sending around a CIA manual called ‘How to be a Bad Bureaucrat and Subvert an Institution from Within,'” Means said. “And [this person] said that 90 percent of employees at HHS, which has 70,000 employees, are working and talking in the lunchroom about this manual and telling each other that their job is to save America and save science from the agenda of President Trump and RFK.”
Means believes this is reflective of “how people think throughout… every major department,” which is why he believes more change is needed. “They need to be firing a lot more people. They need to be doing a lot more, which President Trump is… telling them to do,” he noted. “My image of President Trump from my time in the White House is he sits at that desk and the issues of the world come in and out of office in a 15-minute increment, and he sits there and tells them to go hard. That’s what he says every time.”
Long-Term Fixes
As Means explained, he is “fired up” on this issue because he said the administration is taking on “big, messy conversations on every single level” and putting “warriors” across the government – from Pete Hegseth at the Department of War to Tulsi Gabbard as the director of National Intelligence – “to go up against entrenched interests.”
“We are asking bold questions, and every single time, the media, the expert class, the entire organs of D.C. that profit from this existing system are saying that President Trump is failing, that Bobby Kennedy is failing,” Means said. “This is a psyop.”
With the midterms on the horizon, Means encouraged the crowd not to lose sight of how much work still needs to be done. “The Democrats are saying that the status quo is acceptable, and all we need to do is put more money into our existing systems,” he noted. “This midterm coming up, I think we need to harden up right now.”
“I think we have an opportunity for President Trump to be the most important president in American history, and we must, we must harden up,” he concluded. “We must resist this psyop that’s happening because this is a long-term journey. We need 10 years of MAGA to really uproot these institutions.”
You can check out the full ‘Megyn Kelly Live’ show from Miami, FL, on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you like to listen. And don’t forget that you can catch Megyn live on SiriusXM’s The Megyn Kelly Channel (channel 111) weekdays from 12pm to 2pm ET.